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Abstracts are invited for proposed submissions for publication in a forthcoming collection of essays based on the proceedings of the Spaces of Work 1770-1830 conference held at the University of Warwick April 2012. The publication will follow the broad themes of the conference, but is expanded to include articles focusing on any time within the Long Eighteenth Century, and beyond being focused on Britain to include all geographical locations. Further, the overall headings of ‘space’ and ‘work’ are to be examined in relation to forms of knowledge, broadly conceived.

We are particularly interested in interrogating under-analyzed types of work and space. For example, we hope to develop the theorization of types of work that critics have not conventionally understood as ‘work’ (the performance of music as practical activity, for instance). We also aim to bring attention to under-analysed spaces. For example, due to Romanticism’s traditionally rural focus, literary critics of this period have only recently begun to interrogate urban spaces; interdisciplinary discussion of urbanism in this period would therefore be particularly valuable.

In terms of knowledge, we are particularly interested in forms of knowledge often essentialized and therefore not understood as knowledge as such. The traditionally male knowledge of utilising a commanding voice and demeanour to assert a seemingly innate authority, for example; or the traditionally female knowledge of being able to correctly ascertain the freshness of produce. We aim to elucidate the complex nuances of the interfacing of work, space, and knowledge as three factors that fundamentally shape everyday life in order to gain a greater understanding of material life in the period.

Possible questions which articles might tackle could include:
• How do workers and their work uniquely shape space?
• How does space facilitate or hinder workers and their work?
• How is knowledge acquired, employed, or altered by types of work and working locations?
• How do the social relationships between workers and their supervisors/masters alter according to the work they are doing and the spaces in which they perform it? How does the knowledge encoded in levels of expertise affect the dynamic between supervisors and workers?
• How is knowledge encoded in gender, race, and/or class across working space?

Possible approaches could include, but are not limited to: genteel work and the city; the work of acquiring the necessary knowledge for genteel status; work in spaces of ‘leisure’ and the forms of knowledge encoded therein; work, knowledge, and (sub)urban domestic spaces; gendered working knowledge in the home; space and female accomplishment and the forms of knowledge encoded; working knowledge in relation to emergent manufacturing/industrial spaces.

Pickering & Chatto have expressed an interest in publishing the collection. The exact word length may change, but we expect articles will be approximately 8000 words in length.

Abstracts for proposed articles should be 500 words in length, and be submitted no later than 15 September 2012. Please send abstracts to spacesofwork [at] gmail [dot] com

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As seen at Frankensteinia and elsewhere, the New York Public Library is hosting what looks to be a fantastic exhibition of Shelley circle materials, many on loan from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The exhibit runs through Sunday, June 24, 2012.

Selections from the manuscript of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Godwin’s Diary, digitally published with annotations in July 2010
Correspondence between William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
The Esdaile Notebook containing P.B. Shelley's youthful work (Pforzheimer)
Shelley's gold and coral baby rattle
The only known letter from Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont's daughter Allegra, who died at 5.
A necklace owned by the Shelley family with locks (lockets) of P.B. and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's hair
Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook’s engagement ring and her last letter before committing suicide
Percy Shelley’s copy of his first major poem “Queen Mab,” complete with his notes and annotations. The poem was politically-charged, discussing the evils of eating meat and religion, amongst other things. Shelley actually pulled the poem from distribution after it was published, and it was only widely disseminated after his death.

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Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830 is a collection of texts that illustrate how the ancient North was re-created for contemporary national, political and literary purposes. The anthology features canonical authors (such as Thomas Gray, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Ann Radcliffe). Standard editions of these authors’ works generally lack the contextual framework and necessary commentary that explain the way in which they repurpose Norse material. There are also more unusual selections of lesser known writers, whose texts have not previously been available to modern readers. The range of material presented in the edition has the scope and breadth to allow for new research into the Norse-inflected writing during the period.

The anthology shows how a number of writers utilized the Norse tradition to address issues of political and cultural concern, as well as find new aesthetic models for their poetry. Importantly, the interest in Norse literature and mythology came at a time when the need to recover ancient literary heritage came under tremendous pressure. Before the discovery of Beowulf (and the realization of its importance), the Norse past was taken up in an attempt to substitute for a missing Anglo-Saxon tradition. In England, the need for Anglo-Saxon heroic verse was given an increased sense of urgency as Celtic antiquaries began to publish heroic traditions associated with Wales, Ireland and not least Ossian’s Scotland. The Norse material also appealed to romantic-era writers for its ideals of Liberty, while the dark Norse imagination was exploited as a vehicle for the creation of Gothic terror. Therefore, the anthology contains texts that will be of relevance to researchers and students pursuing a number of different projects.

The introduction, headnotes and extensive annotations place the texts in relation to their original Norse sources. The extensive editorial matter also discusses the perception of the Norse Middle Ages, as these were shaped by sometimes fanciful antiquarian and romanticizing discourses in the period. The electronic edition is a unique resource that makes it easy to compare and search for the characters, themes and ideas that were central to the Norse revival in English letters.

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Romantic Circles is pleased to announce a new volume in the Praxis series (series editor, Orrin Wang), Romanticism, Forgery, and the Credit Crunch, edited by Ian Haywood:

/praxis/forgery/index.html

This Praxis volume looks at the impact on Romantic print culture of the suspension of cash payments in 1797 and the subsequent rise in prosecutions (and executions) for forgery. The four essays cover mainstream novelists (Austen, Scott) as well as radical journalists (Cobbett, Hone) and caricaturists (Gillray, Cruikshank). Ian Haywood edits and contributes to the volume, along with Robert Miles, Alex Benchimol, Alex J. Dick, and Nick Groom. The aim of the collection is to explore the Romantic credit crisis of 1797-1821. The decision to end cash payments and flood the economy with low denominational banknotes led to a spectacular increase in executions for banknote forgery. Many Romantic writers saw this bloody debacle as a sensational illustration of the dangers of an economic system based on mere "paper" value. While some critical attention has been given to the cultural history of credit (Brantlinger, Poovey), the issue of forgery has been overlooked. Yet, as the essays in this volume show, the impact of the credit crisis and its thousands of victims affected literature, journalism and art in often profound ways.

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Announcing a two-day International Conference, hosted by the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of Romantic voyaging, the period, its context and its authors. Papers which address the larger issues of ‘voyaging’ will be welcome too. The conference will include an opportunity to admire some of the treasures of the Rare Book collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library. There will also be time to explore the bracing sea-front and beautiful streets of Wellington with its numerous restaurants and bars, and to ascend via the famous cable car to the Botanical Gardens.

250 word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words together with a brief c.v. should occupy no more than 2 sides of A4 in a Word document (they will be copied into a composite file). Please do not send as a pdf. E-mail to the Conference Organizer Heidi Thomson heidi (dot) thomson (at) vuw.ac.nz by 1 April 2012. All other enquiries should also be e-mailed to this address.

The Charles Brown Bursary of NZ $550 will be available to enable one unfunded postgraduate scholar working in the field of Romantic Literature (currently enrolled at either MA or PhD level) to travel to and deliver a paper at this conference. Please bring this announcement to the attention of qualified applicants.

Registration and website details are to follow.

Delegates need to arrange their own accommodation. There are a large number of Hotels and B&Bs in Wellington. Hotels within walking distance of the conference venue include: Novotel, Rydges, Intercontinental, Ibis, Bolton, Kingsgate Hotel

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in our Praxis series, Romanticism and Disaster, co-edited by Jacques Khalip and David Collings.

In essays by Scott Juengel, William Keach, Timothy Morton, and Rei Terada, this volume considers and responds to the timely concept of devastated life by addressing how the capacity to read, interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or “experience” of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to normative structures?

As a whole, Romanticism and Disaster attends to the rhetorical, epistemological, political, and social effects of Romantic critique, and reflects on how processes of destruction and reconstitution, ruination and survival, are part and parcel of Romanticism’s grappling with a negativity that haunts its corners. Put in this way, “disaster” does not signal a referential event, but rather an undoing of certain apparently prior categories of dwelling, and forces us to contemplate living otherwise. In confronting the end of things, what are the conditions or possibilities of existence amidst catastrophe? What is a crisis, and what kinds of challenges does it occasion? What can be philosophically gained or lost by analyzing disaster in its multiple sites, contexts, and instances?

Robert Bloomfield's letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man.The essays included in this Praxis volume highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield's literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study.They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet.

This volume makes use of the previously published edition at Romantic Circles, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt. This edition of Bloomfield''s Collected Letters constitutes every known letter by Bloomfield himself, plus a selection of the letters sent to him by literary correspondents and those exchanged between members of his circle.

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Romantic Circles is pleased to announce the publication of our newest Praxis volume, Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic.

This volume moves the perspective of critical inquiry into British Romanticism from the Island (England) to the Islands (West Indies), considering the particular significance of the Atlantic—watery vortex of myriad economic and cultural exchanges, roaring multiplicity of agencies, and vast whirlpool of creative powers. Black Romanticism remembers a forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital agencies of diasporic Africans and creole cultures of the West Indies. It does so by practicing counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. The five essays presented here examine texts by or about Jean Jacque Dessalines, Juan Manzano, Jack Mansong, Mary Prince, and John Gabriel Stedman, following a circuitous route that begins in Africa and travels from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. The circulation of radically different adaptations of the “same” material provides new ways to understand the colonial Caribbean. This volume is edited and introduced by Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin, with essays by Lindsay J. Twa, Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Joselyn Almeida, Dustin Kennedy, and Michele Speitz.

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We are pleased to announce the publication of Romantic Frictions, a new volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series.

The essays in Romantic Frictions find in Romanticism what philosophical modernity has often found there: a disposition to recognize oppositions that cannot be squared or resolved precisely because they constitute the ongoing work of culture and writing. Such frictions are embedded in a shifting temporal moment whose inner complexity is similarly textured such that neither history nor philosophy assumes a master (and fictional) disguise. Both are instead crosscut and assembled in ways that sustain an inner friction that invites being read. Rather than reify the critical tendency, stubbornly at issue since the 1980s, to suppose that Romanticism belongs either to deconstructive philosophy or to new historicism, the essays in this volume understand romanticism as a cultural and literary terrain where these and other disciplinary affiliations exist together, not as easy companions but as productive antagonists. This volume is edited and introduced by Theresa M. Kelley, with essays by Ian Duncan, Mary A. Favret, Daniel O'Quinn, Matthew Rowlinson, Colin Jager, and Jacques Khalip.

Capitalizing on the conjunction of renewed scholarly interest in Thelwall and new archival finds, this collection of essays addresses the central question of the coherence and continuity of Thelwall’s diverse pursuits – literary, political, scientific, therapeutic, elocutionary, and journalistic – across the four decades of his career (c. 1790-1830), and provides new insight into Thelwall’s eclipse and persistence in the nineteenth century. The volume includes an introduction by Yasmin Solomonescu and essays by Nicholas Roe, Mary Fairclough, Molly Desjardins, Emily Stanback, Steve Poole, Angela Esterhammer, and Patty O’Boyle.

The Praxis volume is the first in a three-part project entitled, John Thelwall: Recovery and Reassessments. The remaining two parts, edited by Judith Thompson, will be published in October and consist of two scholarly resources:

The first, John Thelwall in Performance: The Fairy of the Lake, documents the first full production of a Thelwall play, his Arthurian romance The Fairy of the Lake. An introductory essay by Judith Thompson offers historical and literary context for complete footage of the play’s performance in Halifax in 2009, while a series of short video documentaries by Brooke Fifield explores the process of bringing this piece of radical Romantic theatre from dusty page to modern stage.

The second, John Thelwall in Time and Text, combines a detailed chronology of Thelwall’s life with the fullest bibliography to date of his works, letters, and manuscripts, including archival locations and sources.

Together, these three components of John Thelwall: Recovery and Reassessments seek to advance Thelwall studies by reconnecting text, voice, and image in the dynamic way for which Thelwall himself was renowned.